Growing up, Lauren was a curious, happy, and energetic little girl. However, her mother Kari noticed early on that she also had an extensively anxious, stubborn, and strong-willed side. As Lauren grew into her teen years, much bigger problems developed. She was having trouble in school and would easily lose control of her emotions. Kari was starting to see the walls of mental illness close in on her daughter, who at age 13 had multiple diagnoses. But Lauren wasn't the only one living through this nightmare. Her family--especially her mother--were too.

In a rare collaboration, bestselling authors Helprin and Van Allsburg worked for nearly a decade on this ambitious, multi-generational trilogy that pits the power of love and devotion against dark forces of greed and suppression. For the first time, this hardcover volume collects all three of Helprin's contemporary fantasies —Swan Lake,The Veil of Snows, andA City in Winter— along with Van Allsburg's sensitively wrought illustrations from the original editions. 39 full-color plates.

Parallel pictures reveal the essential similarities between the lives of two boys, one in a western country, one in a rural African village.

Far from the glittering cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China's borderlands are populated by around one hundred million people who are not Han Chinese. For many of these restive minorities, the old Chinese adage 'the mountains are high and the Emperor far away', meaning Beijing's grip on power is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, continues to resonate. Travelling through China's most distant and unknown reaches, David Eimer explores the increasingly tense relationship between the Han Chinese and the ethnic minorities. Deconstructing the myths represented by Beijing, Eimer reveals a shocking and fascinating picture of a China that is more of an empire than a country.

A collection of original essays by young writers considers the cultural impact of the Star Wars films, from a young man's repeated viewings during the summer his mother died to a young woman's comparison of Jedi teachings to the martial arts.

My Home is Far Away is the most precisely autobiographical of Powell’s fifteen novels. In this family chronicle set in early twentieth century Ohio, young Marcia Willard’s family struggles to keep up with the rapidly changing times, and Marcia endures disillusionment, cruelty, and betrayal to forge a survivor’s sense of independence. John Updike has compared Powell with Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, “and those other Midwestern writers who felt something epic in the national shift from rural to urban, from provincial sequestration to metropolitan liberation.” By 1941, when Powell set to work on My Home Is Far Away, she was better known for the smart, boozy, bawdy, hilarious send-ups of Manhattan high and low life. She had begun to attain a reputation for high sophistication and nothing could be less “sophisticated” – in the glittering, all-knowing, furiously present-tense, big-city manner Powell had perfected – than My Home Is Far Away. This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, “We’re moving, we’re moving! We’re moving to London Junction!” My Home Is Far Away is one of the very few examples of a book written for adults, with an adult command of the language, that maintains the vantage point of a hungry, serious child throughout. It might be likened to a memoir that has been penned not with the usual tranquility of distance but rather with the sense that everything happening to the characters is happening right now, without any promise of eventual escape, without any assurance that childhood, too, shall pass away. My Home is Far Away had been out of print for sixty years when Steerforth reissued it in 1995. It received immediate widespread acclaim, and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where Terry Teachout called it “one of the permanent masterpieces of childhood, comparable with David Copperfield, What Maisie Knew and the early reminiscences of Colette,” and where he proclaimed Powell to be “one of this country’s least recognized great novelists.”

Young, pampered Amalric Antero cared only for real places and possible dreams. The time had come to find his trade wind, to make the traditional journey seeking out new lands, new riches, and new customers as his merchant father, and his father's father, had done before him. Original.

First published in 1957, Very Far Away is the second book Sendak both wrote and illustrated. In this story, a young boy with a new baby sibling, must learn to cope with his sudden lack of attention. He goes out searching for 'very far away'.

Bob Shacochis brings together the very best of his culture and travel essays in one livewire collection that spans his global adventures and his life passions - from surfing, to his obsession with the South American Dorado, to the time he went bushwhacking in Mozambique. Replete with Shacochis's signature swagger, humour, and crystalline wisdom, this is a majestic and essential collection from one of our most important writers.